People of the Book

Pastor’s Epistle—January 2022

A New Year, new hopes, new resolutions. So here’s one for you: Read the Bible.

No, really. It’s not as hard to start as you might think. There are plenty of plans out there that’ll get you through the Scriptures in one year, two years, three years. And you know what will happen if you do? You will have questions for me. Oodles of them! If everyone in our parish read the Scriptures on a daily or even weekly basis, I would be inundated with calls, emails, visits, and letters. It’s all I would do, and I’d love it.

Because the Bible isn’t just challenging—it’s murderous. It kills and resurrects us. It gives us the Christ, Crucified and Risen. When you open the Bible, I guarantee that you will find things in there that will shock you, offend you, upset you, relieve you, confuse you, enlighten you, and just plain tick you off. Some will speak directly to you, in ways you will find shocking. Other bits you’ll have to wrestle with, as Jacob wrestled the angel all night unto the dawn.

Keep in mind that the Bible is not so much one book as it is an entire library; indeed, a library of libraries. We speak of it as having two parts, the Old and New Testaments, but I find it more helpful to understand it as having five: the Law, the Prophets, the Writings, the Apocrypha (yes, that should be in there), and then the New Testament. I would be more than happy to recommend certain translations and study editions.

The Bible consists of a minimum of 66 books, written by at least 50 authors, over the course of 1000 years. It contains history, mythology, liturgy, prophecy, poetry, song, prayer, comedy, tragedy, parables, legends, genealogies, apocalypses, and everything in between. There are genres in the Bible that we know from their literary context, and others that appear unique to the cannon. The Gospels, for example, are their own thing.

Some of the books of the Bible, even the smaller ones, are compilations of works, collections of letters or prophecies, sermons or lists. They weren’t written for you, not directly. Some of them are addressed to societies that haven’t existed for thousands of years. And some books will seem to blatantly contradict others, for the Bible itself is a disputation, an evolving understanding of God and His relationship with His people. And as with any religious discussion, this one includes disagreements and argumentation.

Here’s an easy way to read the Bible: Pay attention to the Scriptures that we post on St Peter’s Facebook page each morning. They’re taken from the Lutheran Book of Worship, and shared with the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, which remains an historic milestone in Christian education for the English-speaking world. I would encourage you to pick up an LBW or BCP for yourself—or better yet, the four-volume prayer book For All the Saints, published by the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau (ALPB).

If you follow those readings for Matins and Vespers (i.e. Morning and Evening Prayer), then you will read through the entire Psalter every month, and the whole of the Scriptures every two years. You’ll even get a nice dose of those Apocryphal books that I recommended above. Try it for a year: a year of reading and prayer, of wrestling and questioning. I guarantee that you’ll have questions for me, and that you’ll have much to explore on your own.

I furthermore guarantee that if even a slice of our congregation did this—followed the readings regularly and prayerfully at home—it would transform St Peter’s from the ground up. It would transform the whole Church! For generations, Christianity was the default setting of the Western world, the vanilla of spiritualities. Much of the faith, and much of the Bible, you could expect to absorb through a sort of cultural osmosis. After all, one cannot hope to understand Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or any great Western writer without first knowing the Bible. It is, in effect, a one-book cure for illiteracy.

But times have changed. The default is now the Nones. Practically no-one reads the Bible on any sort of regular basis today, be they Christian or otherwise. And those few who do often read it through the lens of American fundamentalism—which is, to put it mildly, not the historical norm for understanding the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.

Read the Bible. Just do it. Wrestle with it, get angry at it, laugh with it, live in it. Bring the Scriptures into your homes, and bring your questions back to the Church. Because the Bible in and of itself is not the Word of God: Jesus is the Word of God. But the Bible gives us Jesus—gives Him to us and us to Him. His Spirit brings these pages to life and pulls us into them, so that this story becomes our story, the Greatest Story Ever Told.

15 minutes of prayer and reading in the morning, and another 15 in the evening is all it takes. If you can involve the entire family, so much the better. Coming to Church on Sunday is great, but it cannot take the place of living out our faith each and every day of the week. Sunday equips us—absolves us, teaches us, strengthens us in Word and in Sacrament—to go out and to do the work of Christ, made one in His Body, enlivened by His Spirit.

The whole point of Christmas is that we bring the holy into our homes. Don’t we want to have that be the norm? Don’t we want to welcome Christ each morning, noon, and night; that we, like Ebenezer Scrooge, might honor Christmas in our hearts and try to keep it all the year? I dare you. I double-dog dare you. Read your bloody Bible.

And I’ll know if you do, because like I said, you’ll have questions. And we will explore them together, my brothers and sisters, in Jesus Christ our Lord.